Examining the origins of Quaker abolition, I thought, would serve multiple purposes. I wanted to show how something as important as abolition had a history, and how we could learn about social justice by studying the past. As I looked closer at the 1688 Protest, however, I became less interested in the petition itself than in the last line—a line that was added not by the authors of the Germantown protest, but by the Quakers who represented Abington (Dublin) Meeting and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The first line reads:
We having inspected ye matter, above mentioned, and considered of it, we find it so weighty that we think it not expedient for us to meddle with it here.
Below that follows:
A Paper being here presented by some German Friends Concerning the Lawfullness and Unlawfulness of Buying and keeping Negroes, It was adjudged not to be so proper for this Meeting to give a Positive Judgment in the Case, It have so General a Relation to many other P[a]rts, and therefore at present they forbear It.
While the language is opaque, the conclusion is clear: The Philadelphia Quakers rejected the antislavery 1688 Protest.
I had intended to study Quaker antislavery, but I felt that this was more important. What it revealed is that while a very small minority of Quakers rejected slavery in the seventeenth century, most did not. I had more questions: What did it mean that slavery had “so General a Relation to many other P[a]rts?” What “other parts” were they talking about?
I decided to ask different questions. Instead of reading Quaker abolition back in time, I thought it was important to understand how these slaveholding Quakers fit into their own time.
Slavery in the Quaker World
I began to dig deeper into the seventeenth-century Quaker world. At the time—I was surprised to learn—slavery was accepted and common among the English Quakers who were in political control of Pennsylvania. And that was not all: Quakers were also involved in the slave trade. As it turns out, many of the Quakers in Philadelphia immigrated not from England, but from the Caribbean island of Barbados.
Pennsylvania may have been the first “official” Quaker colony, but it was not the first Quaker community in the Americas. There was a large Quaker presence on Barbados, where thousands of Friends lived. In the 1670s, it was called the “Nursery of Truth” because it was so filled with Quakers.
When Pennsylvania was founded in 1682, William Penn and others used their Quaker connections in Barbados to purchase enslaved Africans. As Pennsylvania’s social and economic structure developed, ties with the West Indies and other trade outlets flourished. The trade with Barbados was a source of pride and a symbol of prosperity for many English Quakers who considered slavery to be necessary for economic development.